S omething strange happens when you catch the train from Preston to Barrow-in-Furness . Somewhere north of Carnforth you start feeling a bit posher, more rural, even slightly twee or fey (no, it’s not the Brief Encounter effect). You might also sense you’re a shade less humorous, a tiny bit less working class perhaps. For, on crossing the River Kent, you enter what since 1974 has been a Twilight Zone of geography and identity. Though the towns on the other side – including Grange-over-Sands and Stan Laurel’s Ulverston – are still in the Historic County of Lancashire , they are, for many people, in a place called Cumbria, near the Lake District, “up there” where nothing is quite certain. The borders of Historic Lancashire started to really matter to me when I began to do research for a book about my home county. Writing a combined work of history, travelogue and memoir – I wanted a bit of all three – about this great territory, minus Liverpool and Manchester , especially, was unthinkable.…